Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo Has A New Album And It’s Completely In Japanese

Rivers Cuomo, the bespectacled frontman of Weezer, has long had a fixation with Japan. And not just a normal fixation, like the way you and your friends sit around at the local food court eating tonkatsu ramen, drinking Yebisu and going “Oh, I would LOVE to live in Shibuya for a whole year…”. No, Cuomo has a WEIRD fixation, and it’s all over Weezer’s work.

1. Take, for starters, the band’s beloved Pinkerton, an album based around Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, an opera about the tragic love affair between an American naval lieutenant and a 15-year-old Japanese girl.

2. And then you have the opening line of the band’s hit ‘El Scorcho‘,  where he sings, “Goddamn you half Japanese girls, do it to me every time…” (he’s not talking about the ’80s noise band’s fanbase there).

3. Or, finally, ‘Across The Sea’, the ultimate example of his creepy fetishisation, which begins with the line “You are an 18-year old girl, who lives in a small city in Japan…” and then devolves into some nutcase celeb-on-fan obsession, complete with the nervous breakdown call-out “IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT, MAMA! IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!”

Anyway, my point is: the guy really likes Japan. So, today’s news that Cuomo, alongside Scott Murphy of millennial pop-punk outfit Allister (never heard of them), just released an album titled Scott & Rivers that’s recorded entirely in Japanese, isn’t nearly as weird as it seems.

Here’s the duo’s amusingly-titled lead single, ‘Homely Girl’, which sounds like the kinda incredibly catchy J-pop-punk tune you might find on ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ or that rhythm-testing arcade drumming game that you can never win on ‘expert’.

For a moment of clarity, we asked our busy Japanese-lingual friend to translate just one line for us so we can confirm that it’s not another creepy Cuomo rant. He told us that it says, “Your smiling face is like the sun.” Well, that’s nice.